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Reading The Pictures is dedicated to the analysis of news photos and media images.

February 10, 2011

CPAC Watch: Getting Dusted

Maybe Rand Paul has a legitimate point to make about energy. Or energy products. Or consumer products. Or something. But then, maybe someone forgot to bring him to up speed on Karl’s adage: politics is TV with the sound off.

I’m not just bashing the CPAC conclave so much as I’m calling out the photo as par for the course, the Republican party just looking lost and groping right now. (And no, that’s not a Chris Lee allusion.) I mean, The Donald as a lead presenter? Are you serious? (Ask not what the country can do for you!) And then, what’s with the breakdown of right-wing discipline, the Paulibertarians more than getting their point across about Cheney’s foreign policy resume. In the old days, if you were a liberal and you tried to publicly shout down Dick for being a war criminal, you could be secreted to your own unnamed location.

Given all that, there are worse things, I guess, than coming off looking like the huckster in a late night cable infomercial.

(Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) holds up what he called a failed energy saving device while speaking at the Conservative Political Action conference (CPAC), on February 10, 2011 in Washington, DC. The CPAC annual gathering is a project of the American Conservative Union.)